ABSTRACT
Karan Johar’s 2010 movie My Name is Khan is a groundbreaking work that addresses issues of social justice and disability. The film uses a character with Asperger’s Syndrome as a vehicle to present the connection between disability and asexuality in Rizwan Khan. The movie situates these aspects of social justice in a transnational context that oscillates between India and the United States and in the diasporic context of a post-9/11 United States. The protagonist, Rizwan Khan, is portrayed as a Muslim South Asian in the United States who has Asperger’s Syndrome and who turns into a heroic figure who transgresses national, racial, religious, cultural and sexual boundaries. Physical disability is often represented as asexual in our contemporary world. While My Name is Khan breaks with the taboo of sexual disability by developing the protagonist from an asexual childish human being into a sexually desiring and active man, this analysis argues that the movie does so not to elevate disability rights, but to make the character appear ‘normal’ in his heteronormative masculinity. Once Khan’s asexuality has vanished and he has become ‘a man’, his vision of a peaceful community, once laughed at for being childish, can be taken seriously. In his quest to meet the President of the United States to tell him that, ‘My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist’, the movie presents a case of social activism that calls for individual action to bring about the unity of minorities in the United States. It speaks to recent and current political events such as terrorism and the election of the first African American President. It also advocates alliances between the South Asian community and
*Email: jfedtke@aus.edu
Vol. 5, No. 4, 521-533, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2014.936209
the (stereotypically represented) African American community when linking the events of 9/11 to a fictional hurricane that hits parts of Georgia and primarily affects the African American community, a scenario reminiscent of hurricane Katrina.
